TTB - Vikki Costello
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colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode of "The Talent Bar." I'm really excited for our guest today. We're gonna hear a lot about her experience. She's been with her existing company for over f- for nearly 15 years, I should say, um, which makes her, I guess I would say, a lifer. Um, she started there as a corporate recruiter and has grown through six different roles to become the senior director of talent acquisition, and along the way she's built everything from a national campus recruiting program to an executive search function.
Um, she has seen some major changes in the team in- including the size, [00:01:00] um, going from more than a team of 20 people, um, and down to a team of under 10. She's migrated ATS platforms during peak hiring, made the business case for interview intelligence tools, and like a lot of folks now, she's staring down thousands of applicants for single, uh, for single roles, and so we're gonna talk a little bit more about that.
I'm really excited to have her here. She is the senior director of talent acquisition at Pariveda. Vicki Costello, welcome to the show.
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be
colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: Yeah.
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: Yeah.
colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: so
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: for
colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: I love to start off asking what is the one thing or one action you think that sets the best recruiters apart from the rest?
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: apart? Oh, that's a good question. Um, I think for me that my team, and I'm-- my team is awesome. Like, I, I think, um, everyone on my team does this, but it's that they're, they're analytical and [00:02:00] they're like curious and diagnostic and I think that really helps you know that like they're not gonna just see something and let it slide past them.
I think, you know, you have to, in recruiting, you're working with people and people are a very unpredictable variable. So being able to kind of dig behind the scene on things, whether it's in an interview or asking why something's happening in your system and why something's breaking, I think that having that kind of curious mindset really makes a great recruiter.
I mean, you have to have grit as well as a recruiter, but I think that that is the thing that takes you just a step further and helps you cover all the angles with what is a very unpredictable
colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: Yeah.
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: element- Yeah ... in your work.
colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: It's interesting because I often hear the same, a similar answer from folks around curiosity, um And, you know being diagnostic. But I love your answer because it also [00:03:00] talks about how that applies to, like, building the systems and being curious about making sure that the way the team is operating is, is working as well, 'cause a lot of times, um, and, and I, I really agree, like, I think anytime you, um, show a lot of curiosity, it's really helpful.
Um, but people often focus on, like, curiosity around the business and, and obviously, uh, you're including that as well. But I think the call-out on just thinking through and having the drive
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: It does
colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: and ability to say, "This isn't working the way it's supposed to," like, "How do I make changes?"
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: Yes. Yeah. And for us it's like there's a lot of layers to it for a small company and like a smaller brand name that m- you know, it's a large talent market and we have a small brand name. so even when you talk to a candidate, for us, we have to be, you know, thinking not just about this role, but the next role, or is there anything else, right?
Like you're looking, you're kind of [00:04:00] examining everything through all lenses. And then with our systems, are really reliant on things working well and having my team catch things fast and raise it so that we're efficient. And especially now with like AI and automations and, you know, aware of and anticipating how to deal with AI and that next wave of challenges in terms of candidate fraud, like this is critical.
And I think that critical thinking skill, you know, you can automate a lot of things, but critical thinking is what's probably gonna help set us apart as a recruiting team in this kind of next wave of work.
colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: Yeah.
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: yeah.
colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: Um, I mentioned this in your intro, but, um, you had shared with me you had a TA team of almost 30 folks when
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: Hope folks went
colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: when you took over in 2022. Um, and by 2023 it was a team of eight. What was it like to, to rebuild everything with a fraction of the people, and what were you really focused on during [00:05:00] that time?
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: Yeah. So it, it, the '20s have been, I, I keep telling people the '20s have been a wild ride. Um, I think it's true for everyone in every organization. I mean, immediately it was, it was hard, right? Like losing people that... And everybody in our organization, you know, tends to be here for a while, and they have a lot of tenure.
So losing people was just hard, and it was a real kick to the team. And then regrouping 'cause there was not a lot of transition or transition time, um, that was hard trying to figure out how do we focus. So we literally collapsed from separate college recruiting teams and separate experience hire recruiting teams into one small group and figuring out what do we do and how do we build from there. So that took a little bit of time for us to, to, to start to think about who can do what and how can I cover this. There was a [00:06:00] point right in '23 where we weren't, doing a lot of recruiting as an organization, so they did, the folks that were left did a lot of different things across the organization too.
They did, they built management skills. They did a couple of other things with the business, which was cool and kinda growth experience for them. And then coming back into the team and coming back into rebuilding recruiting, I think that those things helped us as a group But when we retooled and rebuilt, I think everybody on the team went from being in a smaller group with a smaller focus to really being like utility players, and I think we can all kind of run and cover something. Um, a lot of like and taking ownership, which was great and critical, especially like when you don't know where to s- you're kind of sitting there and you're like, "I don't know where to start. I haven't had this problem before." So that part was pretty awesome. And then, you know, it was a big [00:07:00] opportunity when we started looking at what we use and how do we work.
Like, how can I scale? Because I know I'm not gonna scale by rehiring team.
colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: Yeah
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: And what do I scale, and where do I change things, and what's gonna have big impact? And so from '24 to '26, we did major changes in our process by bringing in AI. We brought in Bright Hire first, um, for doing interview automation and like transcribing interviews and turning around feedback time in our process and being able to, know, remove some of the recruiter admin. And then we migrated ATS as we moved from iCIMS over to Ashby, and that was huge. It was a massive lift, but it was also like at the time and a massive effort 'cause you can't stop recruiting. But that was-- that has had a significant impact on us and I think the organization. Like it- adoption was fast. But those [00:08:00] were two of the big things from a systems perspective that we just had to build.
And then as we grow as a team, we're pretty... I won't say that I'm completely organized in what everybody does and everybody's function. There's a little bit of like we have to kind of be flexible and run and cover, we were able to get to a degree of cover and we kind of-- we're, we're looking this year at how will we build next year and how deep do we need to have cover in each of those areas and kind of build for that and build contingency.
So there.
colleen-gallagher_5_09-11-2026_101458: Yes.
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, you [00:09:00] know, we were Some of it was a case of timing and, like, contract constraints on what we could look at and what we could change, um, and where to make good investments. And looking at it, we, we were looking at our process, and we have a very structured interview process that goes from recruiter interview into a subsequent, four stages.
And I will say pre-pandemic, I don't think I would've had any to make a business case for something like this because we did a lot more in-person interviews. But using Zoom and using that platform, we were looking at, you know, where are the lags in our process? And it was the turnaround time between interviews, a lot of that was trying to get feedback from very busy people. Um, so one of the things that that AI and that tool does is it creates the transcript of your interview. You're able to quickly deliver your [00:10:00] feedback, put in your scoring. It's very easy and it's very seamless for users because it was integrated with Zoom and, like, we ran it through that at the time. So the, the impetus was how can we calibrate our process and make it a little bit faster and pick up some of that? then the secondary layers, like, we have a rigorous process. We trust our interviewers. We have a rigorous kind of right-to-hire interview training program that we run. But was also just that we say we're transparent, and we're creating transparency across the organization with this. You know, people will know, like, that we dug in in the appropriate areas in the interview.
We can trust the interview process even more. And for hiring managers, like, having that degree of trust allowed us to then expand the scope of the interviewer pool for them, which again, we were able to move things a little bit faster and scale, That was [00:11:00] particularly important. So building the business case, you know, I focused on those, like, how many interviews does it take?
What's the time to hire? What's the gap, the start from A to B, like, and building that, then when will we see, like, an investment that pays off based on how much the tool costs, the ROI on it, and how fast will we get there? I did all of that and put the business case together. We brought the tool in, and we went from...
You know, we, we did a pilot, and we had some of our most senior executives participate in that pilot so that we had the right stakeholder group also then advocating for use of the platform that. we went from, you know, zero to, like, 100% adoption in a really short period of time to where our interviewers are like, "This is the bar.
This is what I want. I want to see You know, the notes, I want to see [00:12:00] the detail. I trust the process. We have the grading and the scoring that comes with in this, was something that prior to that was a little bit more manual for us. And then just there was like a lot of those different benefits that we yielded so fast out of it, um, that it really kind of helps, like the business case paid off and then some.
vikki-costello--she-her-_1_09-11-2026_101458: So yeah [00:13:00] Yeah Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah Yeah. [00:14:00] Yeah Well, even like, you know, there's things we do and, and this is even for us it's somewhat under leveraged, but you can pull out the thr- the trends and the themes with the data by market, right? Which has for, for presenting to an executive audience, there's always some interesting value in that. Like, what are we hearing on compensation trends? What are we hearing on like motivations for people across different markets and, and those kinds of things that we're able to pull out as like, this is an emerging theme, or this has higher value, or candidates really kind of anchor here, that kind of thing that has helped us to, to better understand, first of all, what's our value proposition to candidates, what resonates with them, and some of those market trends that we [00:15:00] would've, you know, being purely anecdotal and like there's, there's not this force and this volume of data behind it to back that up.
So those things are pretty cool too. Yeah. I sounds check. Mm-hmm. No Yeah. Yeah It doesn't. well, I will say a few things. My team was, you know, pretty ready to move platforms, and I had team buy-in, [00:16:00] like, at every stage. We did kind of retros together. We did these working sessions on, like, what are our pain points, what do we think we need, what's possible we don't even know, right?
There was an... And there was a lot of that to begin with because we'd had a long-term contract. and then it was from the business side looking at like, again, what is the cost? What are we looking at year over year? What would we have to have in terms of capability in this tool? And we did a complete market analysis.
We did, we, we evaluated multiple vendors, and I brought my team along, you know, in a lot of that analysis. We had the test group, and we did, like, a very rigorous evaluation and scoring from partner criteria to what's our biggest priority and capability. So those things, like, at the point that we made the decision and the, the business case got approved to bring the tool in, the team had, [00:17:00] like, a lot of awareness of what was happening, and that was good. scary part, and there was one senior manager on my team, her name is Michelle, that she did a lot of the build and the architecture for us. We, you know... And that was one of the things in partner evaluation we were going, trying to identify is like the workflows and who builds the processes in, in this tool and what will that level of effort take.
And that, that was substantial. And she did, I mean, an amazing volume of work, and we did stage it. We went live on the first part of the platform last November, and we prioritized getting our experienced hire stuff live. And then this year she did university build out into the system. So we were able to phase a little bit, but, um, you know, we did as much as we could with the vendor in terms of, like, having more of that white glove.
We knew our limits. We're, we're scared of what we don't know. We learned so [00:18:00] much along the way from our last system that, like, we knew we needed as much help as possible and hand-holding, they were great for that. Like, uh, Ashby was a good partner for that. And I think that that's something beyond who it is. partner criteria played a big factor in our decisions, and it usually does in a lot of my decisions because we're a small organization and we have to... The partner has to be kind of match for us so that we're able to have that continuous relationship and dialogue, and that's important. So that was big and made it a little bit easier. I would be... I I, I do think that building the right workflow and trying to get it right so we don't have, like, people hacking the system and technical debt kind of stacking up, was- A big part of our planning and our, our work getting that right, and that was big lift Yeah [00:19:00] Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's kinda interesting because we're-- So we're an ESOP, which is a, a... There can be variations of how an ESOP function works. Um, it-- There-- But internally in the way this organization is built, a lot of the founding architecture, the systems of governance, how we do meetings, how we share information is really transparent, and that's a direct kind of link to being employee-owned.
And then the, the core values that we [00:20:00] have, and this is, you know, where all of that stuff starts to sound dangerously like, ooh, 15 years, there you go. I can hear it. Um, but a lot of those things in our founding architecture are what it kind of how employee-owned impacts us, like the way that there's transparency.
So for better or worse, like when good things happen in the company, the information is shared. When bad things happen, the information is shared. You're not gonna like it, those kinds of things. And so I think that the... And there's like major transparency, like everyone here knows what everybody makes. So, which is a plus and a minus as a recruiter 'cause I can't negotiate anything. You know, the offer is the offer, the level is the level. you can trust that everybody else at your level is capable of a certain amount of things, and you can trust that nobody could out-negotiate you. There's no, like, gender play on this person was able to [00:21:00] negotiate better or anything like that.
But, so I think that those are the ways it shows up. It doesn't show up in terms of a startup culture. Like we're not that. Like, and we don't have that kind of, um, RSUs, and it-- the employee ownership doesn't work like that. So it's a bit more transparency and accountability as an organization. So it's kind of interesting. And some people, you know, that, that can be high value in the market for some candidates, you know? Yeah, we opened [00:22:00] Yeah. That's such a good question, and there's like, um, and my team and I, I think we're, we're-- we go back and forth on this because we all recognize, like, don't want to miss good talent or kind of miss great people you know, you run that risk. But then we also recognize we're not, you know, able to do all of the components of our job really well if we're just buried in applicant review.
So yeah, we opened up university jobs for this fall, in one month we had 8,000 applicants, which, you know, for us is a massive amount of applications to review for just one job. Um, we do add some screening questions, and the team will take the time to kind of read through those. We'll filter through, we do have some knockout questions, and we try to filter with some of that, or we'll try to filter with some of the things like your, clearly your location is [00:23:00] not gonna work for us 'cause you're, you know, based in a different country from where the job is. And that helps us narrow things down. Um, and we, you know, there, there's some AI, like there's a lot of our systems very AI forward. We kind of go back and forth on how much to use it, um, and how much to narrow down. And the team is pretty careful about, like, going with guardrails and, like, pretty stringent criteria on if they're going to use AI to screen and knock out, like, a certain amount of resumes or applications. But in the long term, that's a conversation that we need to have. Well, maybe not the long term. It depends on the job market and how it's, it's-- I will say, right, I think it's, um, you know, a more employer-favored job market right now than candidate, depending on the, the job and the role, but it does tend to be.
So this could be depending on how long that persists, we'll have to talk about [00:24:00] how we use AI and it, it is, it's valuable, but we wanna be careful. So I think our best way to do it is to look at, like, adding more questions to screen seeing how people respond to those or how much AI they use to respond to those, using that to drive the selections faster. Yeah. I've thought about it. Um, it's funny what you like have such a strong reaction to, you know, three years ago versus now. Mm-hmm. Like three years ago if you'd have told me that I would've been like, "Absolutely not. It doesn't align with our values. It doesn't align with who we are. It doesn't [00:25:00] align with how we wanna represent in the market." More because I think it would've been too early adoption, like candidates might not be used to that. And I, I, but I debate now, like, and particularly as we look at people generationally, like the next generation of candidates in the market, what's the norm for them? What are they comfortable with and what are they used to? There could be value in those tools and value in doing that. Um, and it's less and less uncomfortable for candidates. Like, 'cause I really do... For us, candidate experience is a massive part of our process and a massive value differentiator. So for me, I think it's a case of maybe that timing and candidate and market readiness to think about that, and would it be more useful than just a resume and a piece of paper? Does it give us more information and help us make better decisions as a team? So it's a, it's a good [00:26:00] question. I don't have the answer yet. Yes. Yeah Chris [00:27:00] Yeah Yeah Yeah. I think for us to get there, like we're able to share a lot of what is our interview process and what's the objective and purpose of each stage of it to candidates. And so as long as I was able to maintain that and say that we can trust it, you know, um, if, if it can fit within the guardrails and the criteria that we have for acceptable and ethical, um, you know, it- if it helps, and then if it helps candidates too, then it's something to consider. Yeah. [00:28:00] Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's a great question. So it's, it's funny, I've spent a long-- I am somewhat institutionalized after my 15 years here, and I tend to think, think about things in frameworks and grids, and I think about, like, the coverage in terms of, like, the depth I need in executive recruiting and at university recruiting versus, like, the, the locations and the team and, you know, the size of the team. and I don't, I still just don't have a perfect [00:29:00] answer for it because I know that we're still gonna-- we're not gonna be a team size that's gonna grow significantly year over year. But I also have to have some depth to not have risk, right? Like, if somebody decides to move on or leave the team, right, that could create a massive gap or a massive issue. Or if they promote into something different or, you know, that kind of thing. Um, I think for me, I wanna be able to have people on the team who can kinda cover enough and that they're happy and there's value in it for them and career growth for them in they're learning something new. And we kind of organically end up with the team moving folks around that way a little bit. Um, you know, what, what's manageable for you? What are you looking for? What are the opportunities? people kinda get into it that way. I do like that the team knows across the board [00:30:00] how to hire, and they can really run and help and support each other, and that definitely creates a lot of collaboration and a lot of support, and I do really like that. So yeah. Yeah Yeah. It's funny 'cause I, you know, when I do interviews with candidates, they ask me that question a lot, and I, I kind of have my, um, the general reason, like I joined, you know, I had done recruiting agency side for a number of years before that, and I'd learned how to do recruiting and... I was doing a lot of like contract placement for candidates, and it was something where I was like, you know, I wanna represent that I feel like adds value and helps people grow their careers.
Because if I'm gonna be a long-term recruiter, I wanna represent, [00:31:00] to me, the product or the company that I represent is important so that I'm, you know, ethically I can sleep at night when I tell candidates, "This is great. This is gonna be really good for you." So that was a driver in just like the, will I do my job day to day? then I knew I wanted to learn, but I had absolutely no idea what that looked like. And so for me, coming into Pariveda, I was in positions where they were like, I, you know, I would see something and I'd be like, "I think that you could change this or we could implement that." And people would be like, "If you think it, up with the, you know, the idea, the plan, tell me how you're gonna manage it and figure it out."
And I get to do that. And I'm like less of a title person and more of a, annoys me. I'm wired for that. And so I've had the latitude to keep doing that throughout my career, which has been really cool. And then the other piece, even though my team is, we are literally all over the country, nationally [00:32:00] distributed, I really appreciate the, there, there's a lot of good collaboration and team environment, and I like that, right?
It's nice to respect and, you know, really trust the people that you work with, and that's pretty cool across the board as well. So those are the kind of the things that keep me here. Uh, is it, it bothers you? Well, if you wanna fix it, you just have to tell me what you're gonna do. That has been a big driver for me. Mm-hmm. Yeah Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah [00:33:00] Yeah Thanks Yeah Yeah Yeah. It's interesting because we still, you know, we have four steps in the process: recruiter interview, skills or technical interview, behavioral, and then that onsite case. So a fraud perspective, like our process is inherently anti-fraud because it ends in person. So that stuff is great, we still tend to do a lot of the early stage on Zoom so that, you know, people can accommodate [00:34:00] easier in their schedule.
We can still move things through. But we were getting to that point and we were getting a lot of surprises in the process. So we, you know, we do what we always do, which is we step back and we look at everything and we're like, "Where's the gap? What's happening?" So we've taken that to each stage of our interview process, like what can we calibrate? 'Cause it's oftentimes, right, not about making big changes, but like who are we bringing in? What are we screening for? You know, so it starts in the recruiter interview. We built in pilots on how can we do more of an analytical evaluation in the earlier stages of process, and those have been going well and kind of increasing our success rate. have a lot of different hypotheses around what's happening or what's, you know, driving it, you know. And I think some of our concerns are like some of the, the [00:35:00] folks who've worked on Zoom in the last few years and pretty exclusively on Zoom have a different mode of learning than, you know, people who have that working in person and collaborating in person together, and there's just like a gap in their, their learning and their skills base.
And it's interesting 'cause when you look at AI and you-- like I'm, I read the book, um, The Skills- The Skill Code by Matt Beane. It's a really, it's a really interesting read. But he talks about like the gap AI is creating in learning with kind of challenge, connect- connection, and complexity, and those are the ways people kind of build skills and learn. some of our hypothesis is around are we missing components of that and like people are, you know, missing pieces of that. So digging into the analytical has done a lot for us, and that's definitely helping It's all small, but it's all small levers, right? 'Cause you can't-- there's no one [00:36:00] magic. It's the same thing, right?
In recruiting, there's usually no magic pill or no magic fix for anything. So it's just that we w- and we'll do that approach every time we hit issues or every time, like, we know, okay, we have enough structure, we can kind of go into each interview and dig and see what, what's the root and what's the outcome of each interview. So, I talk about AI, and then the AI and the data that we pull from each interview helps us to get to that and helps us to drive on, like, where should we focus and hone in too. So it's, it's the pro/con, right? Like managing it, managing it carefully. Goes back to thinking But I mean, yeah, without it, we wouldn't be able to do some of the analysis that we've done, which is so funny, you know? Yeah. [00:37:00] Right Yeah Yeah And it goes back to-- But even like going back to you were talking about the, um, using AI in interview screeners, like, and this is where you kind of question everything. It's like, well, yeah, maybe that would help us too and get that better data 'cause we would be able to talk to more candidates and remove constraints that we have on how many candidates we can physically talk to, and we might get different outcomes there.[00:38:00]
So those things. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay Mm-hmm How did you, how did you end up doing jobs for the last 15 years? Um, life story. Ah, the origin story. Um- Yeah ... so I actually used to study computer science in college in Ireland. I graduated high school at 17 and started university very young, and I had no idea what I was doing. Mm-hmm ... and I got into computer science, and I hated it. Um, and the irony that, like, I now recruit almost exclusively technical people throughout my career. so I had the opport- I, you know, I did a couple years in college in Ireland. Um, and then I had the opportunity to come out here because I have family out here, and I said, "I'm just gonna come out for one year, and I'll do college out there, and, um, I'll get a real estate license.
I'll make a million dollars, and I'll go home." And [00:39:00] that was a long time ago. And I kinda, I stayed. I wound up getting a business degree with a minor in HR, and then I wound up in recruiting and, um, recruiting technical people for my entire career, so. Um, but that's the right amount of technology for me versus writing code.
So, um- Yeah ... that was kinda how I ended up here. And, you know, when you end up in California, kinda hard to leave. Yeah. It's kind of hard, yeah. San Francisco's a good spot to be, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah Temperate. Yeah I know. Exactly. Exactly [00:40:00] Mm-hmm. Yeah. And thank you for having me. It was awesome. I love chatting about recruiting. Randomly specific career to end up in, but you know, really enjoy chatting about it. So thank you Um, I am on LinkedIn. I don't think I have too many other active, um, professional profiles, but I'm on LinkedIn or you can find me on the Pariveda website randomly. But yeah, I'd love to chat, love to connect with people, so thank you. [00:41:00]